


Hyena

by lonelywalker



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gender Issues, M/M, Shapeshifter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-19
Updated: 2011-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-18 09:20:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raven is not herself. Perhaps she never has been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hyena

_My place is to pick you clean,  
And leave your bones to the wind.  
\- Edwin Morgan, "Hyena"_

He is torn when he makes his way through the windblown streets of the early morning, newspapers spiraling in gutters, a vague dust of moisture in the air. She has seen his body, the way he moves, the way he likes to dress. She has imagined the way he would colour with bruises, marked by scrapes and blisters and deeper wounds that may one day scar. She has mastered the art of the stumble through exhaustion, the dogged determination of a onetime country boy finding his way home. By the time he arrives, dead on his feet, he is exactly who she wants him to be, exactly who he has always been.

The door is opened more quickly than she expects, flung aside so quickly, so roughly that it bangs against the outside wall. The suddenness of the noise doesn't startle her so much as his wife's arms around him, the warmth of a body against his, a body he must find familiar.

He says her name, quietly, hoarse. She knows the rhythms of his speech from her obsessive study of tapes. She knows the painful articulation, the precision of his emotion when he argues, when he stands before an audience blinded by the knowledge of his own righteousness. She knows what he says when he is scared, confused, begging for his life. She has no idea how he might sound in her arms, what he says to her in the darkest, warmest moments of night. But she will have more than enough excuses for a lapse here or there. They will both be grateful that he is alive at all. It's easier to forgive the little things.

She feels tears on his cheek, hears her say his name over and over, and she relaxes.

It's a miracle how much a name can accomplish.

***

One of her earliest memories is of a blue bicycle glinting in the sunshine of a summer day, of a blond boy running wide circles in an empty street, arms spread to catch the wind. She calls him Christopher in her mind. She’s not sure if this is a name glimpsed once on a birthday banner, or gifted to him from a picture book. She remembers playing with the letters in her mind, rearranging them, rearranging their lives so she can feel wind at her fingertips while he stands half in shade at a window. When she is four or five, it is easy to be him, to call herself by the name she calls him, to imagine breathing, moving, being as him.

The Doctor’s books attempt to educate her, to inform a housebound child as much as they can of objects and animals and people who – he assumes – will always remain nothing more than abstract ideas to her. She finds them as much a pleasant fiction – or a pleasant reality – as she does the stories about forest playmates. Even the anatomy books, tugged down from a high shelf by stubby fingers, are no kind of threat. She’s not sure what they might symbolise, these tall pink figures who seem as alien as any fairytale monster she has ever envisioned. They do not ready her for the inevitable betrayal of her body in the days when Christopher is given a bigger bicycle, when he becomes taller and leaner, and she becomes something that disgusts herself.

The bleeding surprises her at first, but she has bled before. Christopher bleeds, she knows, having seen him wail at the sight of torn knees years ago. Breasts, once they grow beyond anything she could interpret as male, shock her much more deeply. The Doctor rebukes her when he discovers her childish efforts to alter her adolescent body, binding her chest, stuffing socks into her panties in the vague hope that they might turn into living flesh. He looks as disappointed at her then as in the moments when she wishes she were pink and smooth like Christopher.

She doesn’t tell him about the other moments, only just before she falls asleep, and then just before she awakes, when she can almost convince herself that her skin is smooth, that her chest is flat, and that a thick shaft of sensitive flesh rests against her thigh.

In those moments, she is Christopher once more.

***

They go together to the morgue, and she holds his hand. It is all right, somehow socially acceptable, to be less than a man in this moment, as he stands and looks at what remains of Henry Gyrich for a carefully-measured amount of time, a carefully-measured expression of confusion and sadness on his face. Creed had done his work with far too much enthusiasm, flaying meat from bones, leaving the man all but unrecognizable. He nods and identifies the body, regardless.

No one expects him to do anything but exist, perhaps maintaining a vague amount of personal dignity. Still, if he were to break down into tears, harm himself, harm others, she suspects there would still be leeway. Heroes have a lot of leeway. He will be forgiven for errors, for slow reactions, for the way he might always be awkward with their daughter.

He makes love to his wife, that night, after they talk over his plans to withdraw his support for the Act. It’s good. Surprisingly good. She wonders if it might be bad to be different, to be unusual, even if being different is better than before. His wife is not the woman she had thought she might be, conservative and repressed and untouchable. She says his name, gasps it, as she feels her body moving against his, as she feels her coming against his fingers, ready for him.

She finds himself hard, hard and slippery as he eases inside her. Looking into her eyes as they make love, as she makes love to someone she has never even met, it is far too easy to let any sense of self slip away.

***

She has a boy’s body the first time she leaves the Doctor’s house. She is sixteen-year-old Christopher, with his blond hair, and wisps of stubble, and eyes she imagines must be blue. She has studied her anatomy, and hopes that the bone structure, musculature, skin tone she has chosen will pass for real. How could it do anything else? There are no living mannequins. Maybe at worst she could be a burns victim, one of those unfortunates with the eerily glossy, hairless skin she has seen in the Doctor’s books. But she is beautiful. She wants to be beautiful.

They call her pretty when she is a girl, when she is Grace – all masculine swagger and confidence in a curvy body she despises. But she uses that body to find something she needs, to blow a boy who might be Christopher in the toilets of a nightclub she’s too young to enter. She needs to feel him, the way he gets hard, the way he gets soft, the taste of him in her mouth.

Later, when Erik makes it clear that it’s not her – flaxen hair, slim hips, perfectly rounded breasts – he wants, she knows exactly what to give him.

More or less.

***

Time makes it easier to delude others, she knows. The true past is replaced by the earlier present, and memories swiftly fade. Soon the differences she cannot mask become just another part of him – a flow to his gait that might be a limp, a turn of speech that might never have come naturally to a Kansas boy. No one thinks too much or looks too closely. Some part of her, some delightfully twisted part, wonders if they like her better, if they like her more.

She reads childish tales to his daughter late at night, explains what she can about the world. She suspects that she does not understand half as much as she should.

Time makes her voice strange when she speaks to Erik by telephone. Her efficient style of reporting by email seems crippled by a lack of imagination. He makes her want to argue. His books, stacked high in the walls of his office, have made her love rhetoric a little too much.

They talk of trying for another child, some nights, and the thought is half comfort, half fear. It is nice to be needed, to be asked, to be held by loving arms. But she shakes his head, sighs patiently against the terror. There is a war coming, after all.

Yes. There is a war coming.

***

The baby almost kills her.

She is not a creature made for motherhood, she tells Erik, neither in physicality nor in temperament. His eyes give her no chance of escape, offer no hope of flexibility once the child is a certainty – a fixed point she can only shift around, but not flee entirely. A tiny collection of genetic garbage, serving as her chains for nine months, locked into a body that becomes more resolutely female by the day.

She has found, over the years, that she can tolerate femininity on her own terms, when she can be strong and aggressive and as ruthless as any man, when she can stand naked before enemies and still laugh, assured of victory. She cannot tolerate motherhood.

When motherhood is torn apart in blood and pain, the child buried or drowned or sent to live out a life behind the Doctor’s windows (she does not care), she can begin to piece herself back together. It is years before she is able to be weak again, to be weak and in that weakness find strength. It is years before she can go to sleep without that reassuring pressure between her legs.

It is years before she is lost again.

***

She is torn, finding her way back through streets she has never seen before with these eyes, stumbling in ways she has never rehearsed. There is no façade to hide behind, no names but her own.

“Raven,” she says to the woman who answers the door in the winter darkness of the early evening. “My name is Raven. I was your husband, once.”

She wishes she could say, _I can be again_. But her hair is black, falling down in heavy locks against her shoulder blades, her breasts press out against the smooth dark of her coat, and there is only an absence where she wishes there was so much possibility.

The door closes, and the wind whips leaves around her feet.


End file.
